Marketing Media-Less Campaigns: How Creating Viral is Like Walking a Tightrope without a Net
Viral marketing, with no media campaign to support it, is like walking a tightrope without a net. The campaign lives or dies by whether or not the audience responds and embraces the campaign, evangelizing it peer-to-peer.
While it’s true that no great media placement can make a print or online campaign a success, it is an equal contributor to the value of a campaign in that it provides at least the measurement of quantifiable exposure.
Viral marketing, on the other hand, is not measured by mere exposure, but by how far you have gone to create a phenomenon of unpaid response in the form of pass-along or click-through.
So while there is no sure-fire formula for mass popularity, there are a number of things to keep in mind in the creative process to keep a long leash from becoming a short noose:
• Research where the audience lives, chats, interacts and socializes online. Is there a hot button inside that community that can be built into a campaign that will bring the client/brand in to the conversation as an insider?
• Don’t overstep the boundaries of taste that you observe existing inside of a community. Okay, maybe overstep it just a little. But what’s shocking to one audience is tame to another. Find where that line is, and dance around it.
• The bigger the idea, the smaller the explanation. If it takes too long to communicate the idea when you describe it, it’s not going to get any easier in a subject line, blog headline, or a bulletin board posting. In any context, you have only a few seconds to capture attention.
• It’s got to be fun to work on. A pretty good sign that you are headed down the right path on a concept is when your creatives are chomping at the bit to work on a proposed idea. If there is lack of enthusiasm about fleshing out the details and people are not eager to get started, chances are you are headed for trouble. If your creative team can’t generate the enthusiasm to have fun, it’s going to show in the execution, and the audience won’t bite.
• Listen to the client. Sacrilege! As unpopular as that notion might be to some creatives, the client knows the audience much better than you do. Listening to their feedback about how they believe their audience will react is invaluable. That doesn’t mean let them direct the creative, but learning how extract value from the clients knowledge vs what might water-down or ruin the creative is another black-art skill of the profession.
From a business perspective, the difficulty with the business model of creating viral marketing online is that there is not a significant amount of re-use of digital assets project-to-project, client-to-client. The most significant asset you own is the instinct and intuition that comes from experience, trial and error, failure and success. But in a media environment of rapidly escalating clutter, combined with increasing opportunities for audiences to fast-forward, skip, or ignore, it could be the most tangible and valuable asset of all.
It’s risky working without a net, but it’s the kind of high-wire act most creatives are willing to live with (and sometimes thrive on) in return for hearing those magic words from a client, “we want to take a risk…”
Reader Comments.
- Pingback from Sales » Blog Archive » HHDA to discuss marketing plan
Leave a Comment
Pages: « previous page 1 2
Article Sponsor
More Features
-
Loading ...
Latest News
- Readers weigh in on ATT, ad networks and the iPhone July 2nd 2009 ADOTAS — In our weekly poll, readers overwhelmingly said that [...] more »
- Hiring, promotions, location, partnerships and product news July 2nd 2009 ADOTAS — Internet Oldtimers Foundation, Jumptap, eXelate, Kampyle, The Digital [...] more »
- OPA large ad units unfurl across the web July 1st 2009 ADOTAS — The Online Publishers Association said a group of [...] more »
- Email spam in June worst since 2007 July 1st 2009 ADOTAS — MessageLabs Intelligence released its numbers for June, and [...] more »
- Joost becomes YouTube roadkill, starts layoffs July 1st 2009 ADOTAS — Despite reworking its technology to work in a [...] more »
- Ad networks, not websites, choked on Michael Jackson news July 1st 2009 ADOTAS — The news of the pop star’s death saw [...] more »
- StrongMail doubling down on social media, buys PopularMedia July 1st 2009 ADOTAS — StrongMail has announced that it acquired PopularMedia, a [...] more »
Spotlight
Trust Me – I’m a Professional … SEOADOTAS — At WebMetro we typically provide SEO Action Plans as part of campaigns. As the name implies, an SEO [...] more...
Features
- Automakers Need to Become Better Conversationalists July 2nd 2009
- Affiliates can win in the media buy game July 2nd 2009
- Crowd-Sourced Ads: A Measured Response June 28th 2009
- Is the government coming for you? June 28th 2009
- Customer Loyalty: How to Earn It June 25th 2009
Reader Favorites
Layoff Tracker
- AOL - 700
- Apple - 50
- Clear Channel - 2,800 total (1,000 currently)
- Google - 340
- IBM - more than 7,800
- Joost - about 90
- MySpace - in June, about 720
- World Avenue - 30 percent of workforce
- Yahoo - 2,220 total, about 700 currently
- Zango - closes, about 90, in addition to earlier layoffs
Classifieds
Recent Comments
- Josette Davids: Great article and an amazing time was had by all at this event. I'm an
- Mike Poserina: There is also a tragic flaw rumored in Bing's ad placement engine. When resolved,
- Andy: Erin, Never mind the commenters who can only see the negative side of things. I thank you
- pkohler: We've also noticed that ads frequently adversely affects the performance of a Web page. As
